I don't want to make anyone lose faith, just wanted to ask as a guy who was debating an atheist.
I used the usual "12 Apostles died for their faith" argument for Christianity, but checked the Wikipedia to make sure and it tells me this:
en.wikipedia.org
I still believe because of many other things like miracles, but this destabilized one of my core arguments I usually used in conversations with atheists. What do you say guys?
Other urls found in this thread:
newadvent.org
epicurus.net
newadvent.org
biblegateway.com
en.(((wikipedia))).org
answersingenesis.org
twitter.com
Why are you debating people on matters you're not knowledgeable about?
Hahahahahaha
He's significant for being one of the fathers of modern historical study, but essentially everything he wrote was wrong. He's interesting as a historical curiousity, but nothing more.
This is the yolo scriptura meme, apostolic tradition passes on the fate of the Apostles. Apostolic tradition is evidence!
Don't worry about this. The key elements are the same in both - he regretted, but did not repent, and killed himself. The purpose of the Bible is not primarily a historical account.
Yes, but I need something to believe in Biblical God and that the Bible is true.
vs
Yes, but sometimes you have two churches claiming to have the same relic and obviously one of them may be misguided or straight up lying. People aren't perfect.
'Biblical God' should strike you a bit flat - we worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Bible testifies to the acts of God and to our salvation in Christ. We are invited into Christ's Church and are fed spiritually therein. The basis of our hope is the Risen Christ. Remember, the Bible is a pointer to God - that's its function. You have to come to faith in the Resurrection pointed to in the Bible. That is, we have a living faith, the Bible is an essential part of that faith, but not its totality.
I mean, look at the Pharisees. Their whole idea was "We'll do what the book says!" Obviously, that wasn't the right answer. The something you need to believe in is Christ.
Ok, but I can't just believe when there is thousands of gods to choose from. I need some irrefutable proof. This used to be the martyrdom of the Apostles. But now I check, and it turns out that isn't 100% confirmed. I hope you understand my problem. I didn't come here to make people stop believing, it's just my personal faith problem.
If you find it helpful, you might start reading patristics. They will show you the continuity of the faith. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who was a disciple of John (yes, THAT John). Pic related is very accessible. The Didache is also very accessible, it's a 1st century source, almost certainly written by a disciple of Matthew: newadvent.org
As for certainty, look at Hebrews 11 on this. It's not just something you believe, it's something you do.
yeah, once you actually learn the history on your own, all the remarks and historical notations Gibbons are make hilariously wrong, or just incredibly stretching and mostly unsubstantiated.
you must be out of your damn mind
With Gibbon it's hard to tell if he was lying or if he just didn't understand the sources he was working with. He was adamant about using primary sources, but I don't know if he could read Latin and Greek well enough to understand said sources. A lot of his inaccuracies, like his retarded conspiracy theories about Eusebius, seem like misunderstandings that could stem from a poor grasp of the language he was reading.
If you want to debate an atheist, go debate Epicurus. He's been dead for centuries and you guys still can't refute him.
st. augustine did that a millennia ago
Epicurus never said the quote your thinking of, fam. Lactantius said that in A Treaty on the Anger of God as a way of strawmannig the Epicureans before refuting their beliefs.
epicurus.net
Funny. I find his long-winded argument against Epicurus here, but don't seem to see where Lactantius asked the Epicurean paradox.
Answer. If God is both benevolent and omnipotent, then whence cometh evil?
You know huh…there is an answer to it but…it will be banned here because muh heresy
The truth should not fear inquiry. Speak the truth as you see it, if you have it.
do not trust mr. D.
Are you winnie the pooh kidding me? Is the word "demiurge" autobanned? Is the sentence "Do not trust the demiurge" autobanned? Does Zig Forums have autocensors in place that detect and ban opposing views?
Am I going to get banned when I click "New Reply"? I don't know yet, but I would not surprise me. Silencing opposing views is as Christian as it gets. Ironic, considering their history.
To hell with it. If I don't manage to get myself banned from every Zig Forums board including /delicious/ within the month, I haven't done my job right, anyway. I'm going to sleep, and I'm going to imagine no religion.
I wonder if you can.
De Ira Dei, Ch. 13.
newadvent.org
why dont you just use a better argument instead?
If it's just that…
We can attest for sure that thousands of christians were martyred, yet of none of them we have proof.
Some instances of martyrdom might've been written down and this could be seen as historical evidence but other stories might've just been passed down by word of mouth.
Because we know for sure that christians were martyred, and both the bible and talmud describe the hatred of Pharisees for christians, we can attest that even without hard evidence it wouldn't be strange to believe tehir martyrdoms.
What's the deal with this guys?
I've read that some fathers apparently interpreted this as meaning that Judas hung himself and was left there to rot since no one took him down, hence the "bursting open".
Epicurus is trivially easy to refute. Ask the atheist to objectively define what evil if, after they finish spluttering point out that the argument relies on an objective definition of evil and if they can't provide one then the argument is void. Q.E.D
Atheists are retards who usually equate "evil" with suffering or anything that infringes on their hedonistic desires so if they try spitting that out it's also a good chance to educate them on the true nature of good/evil instead of "stuff I don't like is evil!"
This doesn't exactly answer your question about the apostles, but I think it's useful none the less
The website you used didn't include the whole treatise. Didn't you find it odd how it was obviously missing chapters? See
Someone found him days after he hung himself and cut him down and because his body had already begun to rot for quite some time, he "burst open" when he hit the ground.
Why does that pic look so….luciferian?
cause it's gnostic tripe
There's nothing Luciferian about it.
I don't understand this general illiteracy concerning the Western Classics/esotericism.
It's embarassing that you see this circular logic as a refutation.
What's embarrassing is that you're too much of a brainlet to understand what Lewis is actually saying. His point is if you assert your thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions dominated by cause and effect then why should we trust them? The arguments for atheism are self refuting because your argument is "I'm just chemicals thus my logic cannot be trusted because I'm not in control of my own will and my argument is simply the result of chemical interactions occurring in my brain I have no control over"
The malicious infringement on another person's liberties in order to benefit oneself. Murder is evil because you are infringing on a person's right to life. Theft is evil because you are infringing on a person's right to own property. Rape is evil because you are infringing on a person's right to their own body. Et cetera.
You claim your God has the power to stop these things, but chooses not to, but he totally will one day guys just not yet. That, to me, is either malevolence, or the actions of a child playing with toys for which he holds no personal value.
Where do rights come from?
Those are not objective and according to materialism (the philosophy most atheists adhere to) there is no such thing as rights, they're a social construct and have no basis in objective reality, so try again honeybunch.
By whose standard?
By what standard? Quo warranto?
This is a logical leap and you need to walk this statement back to validate each of its components.
First of all you need to define evil. You haven't done this. You have basically said "evil is evil".
So, he's this? Why should I trust them, my own thoughts? Because they are mine. I take responsibility for my actions, my failures and successes both, because I chose to make those decisions. I don't know why I do, and I do not claim to know why, other than my mind told me that those choices were the ones to make at the time.
You cannot have both free will and an omniscient God, and you cannot have evil and an omnipotent, benevolent God. Omniscience means that God knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, and omnipotence means that God has the power to alter any single one of those events at any point of his choosing. Every good, every evil, every action is directly the result of that God's decision, but it's an issue to you that some people believe "free will" may be nothing more than chemical reactions?
I call them "natural". You say they come from God. They stem from the overwhelmingly collective desire of humanity to not be used and abused.
Yes you can, knowledge of your future actions doesn't interfere with you using your will to make those decisions. If I know you well enough that when a server at a restaurant asks "Coke or Pepsi" that you'll choose coke I haven't removed your free will just by knowing your decision process well enough to know what you'll pick
Honestly this is why atheists are laughable when it comes to defending the philosophical basis of their worldview. You give the most cursory and superficial thought to things then think you've got it all figured out without understanding anything. You're the freshman who just took Psychology 1 and thinks now he can diagnose all his families mental health issues.
So you've managed to justify things like assault and murder being morally wrong. What about abortion? How well does your ethical philosophy hold up when you start testing it with moral grey areas and not "Hitting people is wrong!".
Well, I would say that the only kind of rights capable of creating moral obligations on others are moral rights, and moral rights are the flip side of moral responsibilities. In general I have a moral right to do whatever I have a moral responsibility to do. Moral responsibilities come ultimately from God, either immediately through divine law or mediately through nature.
For example, I have a moral responsibility, which arises from nature, to protect and take care of my own life. Therefore I have a moral right to live and obtain the things necessary to continue my life. Hence I have a right not to be killed by you, and as such, it is immoral for you to kill me.
It seems to me that the difference between us is that you would locate the ultimate source of these rights in natural, universal human desire, whereas I locate the ultimate source of these rights in God.
The problem with your position is that overwhelming and/or collective desire by itself cannot establish a moral norm. I can show you this if you just agree, and I hope you will agree, with this statement: "Moral rules are rules about what choices should be made by humans".
For if moral rules concern what choices should be made by humans, well, we make choices with our wills (whether free or not). Examining the nature of the will should therefore tell us about the rules for making choices.
If it's true that all humans universally desire X, then it would seem to be a moral norm that X is morally good. The problem comes in when humans universally desire not only X but also Y, and that X and Y turn out to be contradictory goals in a non-obvious way.
In such a case, we would want to say that X and Y are both moral imperatives, but it would turn out that pursuing X would lead away from Y. In fact, every individual goal of any desire must be in at least a bit of conflict with every other goal, if only for the reason that our time on earth is finite, and hence, giving time toward the attainment of any one goal must necessarily imply losing that time for the attainment of any other goal.
So in practice, there must be a hierarchy of goals which the will can choose from, with one and only one thing at the apex: the very highest and greatest possible desire, for the sake of which it would be worth while to spend all of one's time pursuing and neglect every other goal.
Or, at least, it has to be that way IF you want to have a moral system that is absolute.
If you also want your moral system to be universal, it needs to be the case that every human being desires the same thing as their highest goal. And if you ALSO want your moral system to be objective, there needs to be something objective about human nature that makes it the case that humans are just the kind of things that desire that particular goal by nature.
So, you can build a moral system on human desire, but unless you construct a hierarchy of values, show that exactly one value is at the very top, and that this follows from something objective about human nature, you can't ultimately escape subjectivism.
I…what proof do you want? "This is how I was killed" by Andrew?
eg this?
Not to mention that most of the apostles split off and went to preach the gospel to other nations, as Jesus commanded. Thomas went to India for example. They would've been nobodies in the regions where they were martyred and it would only be in retrospect that people realized that they were a big deal and telling the truth.
No, since an omniscient God would know your decisions before you make them even without interfering
Those things cannot coexist
Basically an omniscient God has an absolute accuracy not a probabilistic accuracy of every single event which occurs
The only way you can say you have free will is by saying "since God is almighty he can decree a logic beyond human understanding"
But then don't try to explain God with human theology again, rather accept you have no proofs
If someone travels into the future and knows what action you're going to do, that doesn't mean you don't have free will.
If he infected your brain with a mindcontrol virus then you wouldn't have free will
God is the cause of your existence and he knows everything since beginning, he is not merely an observer
If you make a robot you know he will not become like you
Also supposing the traveller can go back in the past, if free will is true then he could alter the future making his vision invalid and merely the present
PS: the grandfather paradox was solved by quantum physics through superposition probabilistic states, a thing that cannot exist with an omniscient God in human logic
Not to sound like a Pentecostal or some philosophically weak person, but if your faith is shaken by some atheist using another atheist’s made up/misread arguments on why your faith is stupid, then your faith is weak. The Holy Spirit should give you a ferm assurance that what you believe is true, and that the traditions of the Church Fathers are accurate. Remember: you’re not debating over a mere metaphysical concept, but a living breathing Godhead who will assist you in your quest for truth and your spreading of it.
You're assuming that God is within time and merely views the future from the present, as though He's some fortune teller with a crystal ball. This is not the case. God exists outside of time because. The past, present and future are all present to Him. Look at this painting, the major events in The Song of Roland are all taking place at once, from the beginning to the end. This is the closest thing I can compare God's view of time with, obviously it's not perfect since we, who exist within time, can't have a clear view of existence outside of time, but I think it gets the point across.
And it is indeed for this reason that you don't have free will, God already seen the day you will be dead
I don't see anyone talking about that Sovereign Decree and Election.
In case you meant that the future the present and the past are all evolving at the same time and they influence one another without direct cause and effect then we are back to the second point: God does not know everything, he sees all things
And that's the most logical conclusion if you want to prove free will with human logic
Like many others have said ITT, just because God knows what's going to happen does not mean we have no freewill. You have yet to refute this. True, God does influence the course of many things in the universe, but He also allows us freedom in our actions. I don't know what you think freewill is, but that is literally the definition of it. Because He is not limited by time, He obviously knows the outcome of said actions. That does not, however, mean that he controls each and every outcome. How do you still not understand this?
Yes and God could alter the future as well
You're assuming with God there is only one line of possiblity, not so. God, knowing all things knows all possible outcomes, and is going with this one.
God knows what actions your going to take because he knows the future, not because he "programmed you that way". You cannot honestly say that free will doesn't exist because someone knows your future actions.
You said
So, by your logic. If a time traveller knew someone's actions before they commited them, then they have no free will. Only the time traveller does since only he can change history
No. that's not logical at all. Knowing all things doesn't cancel out free will.
A human fetus, endometrial pregnancy, is one of the most parasitic in the world of mammalia. Most other animals can voluntarily abort if the fetus presents a danger to their lives. God made them that way, according to you. Why did he leave that ability out of his chosen people? Does he enjoy GERD?
That is not omniscience, then. Omniscience is the knowledge of EVERYTHING. Everything ever. Everything that has ever happened, is ever happening, or will ever happen. To the omniscient, all time, all events are as one. The omniscient is incapable of being surprised, because the omniscient knows all. He knows whether you will drink coffee or tea when you wake up one week and three days from now because, to the omniscient, you already have.
Because human life has value, animal life doesn't. Also nice to see despite all your high minded talk of "evil" you're just as misanthropic as every atheist when it comes right down to it. You don't give a winnie the pooh about human life or suffering, you virtue signal because it appeals to your egoism then you turn around and make jokes about human babies being "parasites". Doesn't take long for you people to reveal how much you really despise the sanctity of life.
Some would argue that every life has value. When I take an animal's life, I do not do so because it has no value to me; that is the action of a psychopath. I take a life precisely because the life I take IS valuable to me.
You are correct in that I do not see human life as inherently superior to animal life. I value human life because I am human, and that gives me a large bias. Even so, there exist humans capable of greater cruelty and savagery than the most rabid wolverine. You would tell me that those lives hold more value than a deer's life, simply because they are human?
Yes the lowliest human has infinitely more value than the greatest beast. We are made in the image of God, the bests were made to serve us. It's interesting to see how modernism has twisted your mind to the point where you think a deers life can ever outweigh that of a humans. You think you're being rational but if you keep following the path of logic you're on now it leads to eugenics, pogroms and ethnic cleansing. The sanctity of human life is inviolable. Without that then who is deserving of life and who isn't comes down to nothing more than a matter of opinion. Your views are monstrous, you just don't understand that yet because nobody has used them against you and you're safely cocooned in a culture of Christian morality.
I wouldn't eat a human unless in dire need. The deer's life is infinitely more valuable.
Also I'm going to quote you something from the arch-fedora himself, Friedrich Nietzsche who understood the problem well
Because that would be murder
life and sentience is incredibly hard to pin down or define. Whatever definition you give that allows for abortions will allow for the killing of mentally disabled or physically disabled unless it's solely a matter of time - which it is- and which is incredibly arbitrary.
The only rational statement of personhood is an individual instance of DNA. Once there is unique DNA, growing on its own, it's a human and purposeful destruction of it is murder. It's cohesive, logical and empirical. That's why life begins at conception. Everything else is arbitrary or logically allows for cruel eugenics programs (which is where the libs would go if they could)
The mentally or physically disabled are no longer literally eating their host's body.
No, they're just parasites on society
How very Christian of you.
Furthermore, a child is, by your logic, a parasite on their parents. Eating away at their resources and offering nothing.
A child is a child. A fetus is not a child.
Not really, it was very un-Christian of me, because I was using your mindset
Human life is human life, a fetus is human life
You were a fetus
Pathetic.
I was. If I were obliterated in the womb, I would have never felt a thing, never learned a thing. If that meant my mother would have lived, I'd be okay with that.
Also funny how if the mother wants the fetus, people call it a baby, but if they don't, they call it a fetus. Typical leftist tactics
It's literally a website that's maintained by leftists with no life. All of the pages concerning Christianity are highly highly politicized and written with the presupposition that Christianity is not real.
HURR DURR WHO IS STEPHEN biblegateway.com
Stop relying on secular sources, because they're not neutral, it's a false neutrality that presupposes the invalidity of Christ. Jesus said that either you are with Him or you are against Him. And stop debating people if you don't know much about the subject. Learn up, watch apologetics, read your Bible, and then go debate people. RZIM, William Lane Craig, David Wood, Jeff Durbin. Look them up.
None of that contradicts what I said and none of that means we have no freewill. Just because God knows our every action doesn't mean that He is the one making us do them. Let's look at the definitions of freewill.
Seriously? You said a fetus is literally eating their hosts body and should be destroyed nice use of nasty sounding words to dehumanize and that is what made them different to the mentally disabled, what I was saying is that a similar situation can in fact be applied to the disabled in that they take more from society than they contribute, this is what I meant when I said
The fact that you didn't piece that together is telling. I'm honestly starting to think you're a tumblrite, not even Zig Forums but a full-blown dyed-haired fat-positivity gender-nonbinary tumblrina
Ah, here we go. The old fallacy of using extreme situations to apply rules to every situation. Now, the question of whether a mother should abort a pregnancy if she won;t survive it is worth asking, if the child wouldn't survive either then I suppose so, but if it would, then it's not so simple for various reasons including that the mother has already lived life so far and would die sooner than the child would. But if the parent is just doing so because they don't want a child, then they are objectively a murder and I would say they should be punished but the depression most aborting mothers usually get is probably punishment enough
>I don't want to make anyone lose faith, but…here's a (((Wikipedia))) article
I say halfchanners peddling stale memes and athiesm need to go.
historical version of shadman
also Thomas was most definitely martyred in India
Yes it does, else you wouldn't have software running on your computer
Knowing things with 100% accuracy destroys any chance of free will since God is not only the observer but also the causer of mankind
We've been over this over and over again. God is the cause of mankind but he does not control each and everything we do. Our actions are still voluntary on our part therefore we have free will.
He doesn't control but he foreseen everything, just like you don't control your software but can foresee its behaviour from code
Okay, but that doesn't cancel out free will. I posted the definition of both freewill and free will in this thread and that doesn't God knowing all doesn't contradict the definitions of either.
Don't share your personal pictures. Nobody cares what you look like.
My mistake. I was going to type something else at first and forgot to erase part of the original sentence because I was in a hurry when making that post. My point still stands though, God knowing all does not cancel out free will.
I'm guessing that it's from the iconoclastic protestant bent where symbolism isn't extensively used except by occultists who subvert legitimate things with lies and revisionism. Got this stained glass from pol and even though there was some other questionable cryptic stuff in the same posts this overt Christ symbolism had people projecting occult meaning onto it.
The deletion of my posts tells me everything I need to know. The truth does not fear inquiry. Lies fear being challenged.
Or you probably just broke one of the rules without realizing it we've all done that and got a temporary ban. When you get banned all your posts automatically get deleted.
